Sour Grapes

By Thomas McNamee

Published: October 20, 2002

THE FAR SIDE OF EDEN

New Money, Old Land, and the Battle

for Napa Valley.

By James Conaway.

365 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $28.

IN a certain few American places endowed by nature with particular beauty -- Jackson Hole, Wyo.; Aspen, Colo.; the South Fork of Long Island, the Napa Valley in California, among others -- the big new money of the late 20th century has built some spectacularly vulgar shrines to itself. The houses are often situated for the sake of the view from within, staring obliviously past, or through, the world into whose own view they obtrude. What seems underreckoned in the chagrin of those of us staring back is that these ghastly piles often do not only esthetic offense to us but also physical damage to what drew both us and their owners there in the first place. Wildlife habitats are destroyed, pristine waters degraded, mountain horizons defiled, natural beauty spoiled.

In the mountains that define the valley of the Napa River, many a new ridgetop castle demands also its own vineyard, and in many cases, as James Conaway writes in ''The Far Side of Eden,'' ''the cost is irrelevant'' -- cost not only to the owners but also to their neighbors. The slopes below are steep and unstable, held in place by a dense interweave of roots and rocks, and the consequences of ripping them out can be dramatic. At the first vineyard cleared for the Viader winery (whose signature wine now sells for just under $1,000 a case), ''in the autumn of 1989, young vines protruded from a steep slope deprived of ground cover, the soil free not just of pebbles now but also of native plant life. That time of year, storms can sweep in from the Pacific Ocean with suddenness and intensity.'' In roared the rains, and the vineyard and a neighboring property slid down the mountain. They buried the police shooting range with mud, and came to rest in the reservoir that supplies the city of St. Helena. Delia Viader, the vineyard owner, ''would not admit that runoff from her property reached the reservoir. . . . Neither would she admit the fact of the disaster, pointing out that no fish had been killed in the reservoir, that the drinking water remained potable. . . . And she avoided paying even a small fine.''

Conaway published ''Napa: The Story of an American Eden'' in 1990, and among the changes he has seen since then he seems especially to abhor (perhaps also to revel in) the arriviste vulgarity: the woman who ''sold her mauve Bentley because it had no rack for holding lattes''; the ''monogrammed toilet paper, each square resembling an illuminated manuscript''; at the Staglin Family Vineyard, the pebbled courtyard that one enters ''between columns bearing the lacquered ceramic sculptures of the Staglins' Jack Russell terriers.'' ''We've got a lot of lifestyle here,'' adds Garen Staglin.

This kind of stuff is fun, but there is an awful lot of it before you get to the drama that makes ''The Far Side of Eden'' worth reading. Much of the first half of the book is made up of aimless character portraits of Napa's heroes and villains. Along the way, Conaway stumbles through some truly gruesome metaphors. He writes of vineyards ''hanging up among the trees like apostrophes in a long, elegant passage written by the Creator about sublimity and the agrarian dream.'' Sport utility vehicles get the double whammy, having first ''ascended on weekends like metallic insects on the vernal skin of a sleeping beast'' and then, in the very next sentence, ''passed under volcanic rocks with deep striations, eyed by buzzards tilting overhead, lending the scene a medieval quality.''

Finally a real story gets going, and it's a good one. The postmaster of St. Helena, Peter Mennen, who runs the post office barefoot and accompanied by his electric-green parrot, comes into his family's skin-products fortune, and with it he subsidizes the campaign of a ferocious local activist, a woman named Chris Malan, to annihilate the manifold iniquities of the winemaking business. As far as he's concerned, wine is nothing more than ''flavored alcohol'' anyhow. Mennen has a lot of money, Malan has a lot of energy and together they raise a lot of hell. A group of growers ''determined to find a way around environmental regulations'' forms an organization to fight back. Other wine people at first ally themselves with what they see as a vision for a natural reconciliation of agriculture and conservation. Soon, like so much else in politics these days, a dispute between private and communitarian interests becomes a culture war.

Meanwhile, an effort has been under way within the wine community to bring about nearly everything that Malan wants. Most grape farmers know that the Napa River has been severely damaged in the past, that vineyards heedlessly perched on steep slopes are a prescription for calamity, that the Napa Valley is just about out of land suitable for viticulture. Lost from sight in the middle ground, many of the vintners are happy to have what they see as ''the best erosion control and land conservation regulations in the United States.''

There are also rogues whose only law is Stewart's Law of Retroaction -- ''It is easier to get forgiveness than permission'' -- and Malan thinks they're getting way too much forgiveness. She persuades the local Sierra Club ''to sue the county for neglecting state environmental laws and to sue specific property owners for wreaking havoc in the hills.''

As the lawsuit progresses, Malan decides to run for a seat on the board of supervisors, Napa County's governing body. The seat she wants happens to be occupied by the conservationists' best ally on the board. ''Everyone was calling, telling Chris not to run,'' Conaway writes. ''This included even her friends in the Sierra Club.'' Malan gets 10 percent of the vote, taking just enough away from the conservationist supervisor to elect the pro-development candidate. The Sierra Club gains what seems to be a favorable settlement, but, Conaway says, it ''had in fact failed.'' Applications from vineyard developers hoping to get in under the wire triple. Illegal grading increases. The county planners can't keep up.

Peter Mennen runs into trouble with the Postal Service, which wants the St. Helena office cleaned up and the parrot gone. He counters with a letter from his therapist ''saying that he needed the bird in his office to help relieve his anxiety.'' Chris Malan eventually alienates even Mennen, and the moderate conservationists, though weakened, are back in position. The influx of the new rich continues: at the Napa Valley Wine Auction, a former dot-commer buys 10 magnums of Harlan Estate cabernet for $750,000. Delia Viader is dynamiting out another mountain vineyard.

After its slow start, ''The Far Side of Eden'' takes on some urgency, and by the end one realizes that it has been a quite important story, emblematic of our time. It is about not only wine but land, not only land but greed, not only greed but the get-out-of-my-way self-entitlement that seems to characterize more and more of American society.